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Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > May > 05
Monday, May 5, 2008
Who are the true Atlanta Hawks?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thirteen hours after the Hawks made their latest and last return from Boston, they gathered at Philips Arena to clean out lockers and to make sense of what they’d just done. And, more to the point, what they might do.
“We can do something special,” said Josh Smith, who will have to be re-signed for this buzz to linger. “We’ve always been a team at the bottom of the totem pole, but now we’ve been in the playoffs and been successful.”
Here, however, is where it gets tricky. As this suddenly buoyant franchise sails on, does ownership judge the Hawks on what happened over a six-month regular season that ended with the team 37-45, or does it take the stirring events of 15 spring days as the new reality?
“I have not spoken to my [Atlanta Spirit] partners,” said Michael Gearon Jr., speaking by phone Monday, “but we will take a step back for several days and let the emotion settle. And I would not take that statement and conclude that one or the other [meaning general manager Billy Knight or coach Mike Woodson] is gone or will be fired. That is not a foregone conclusion.”
That caveat aside, the guess is that the Spirit will shed Knight and keep Woodson. That belief took root in March, after Knight’s latest attempt to sack Woodson was rebuffed (and made public). If ownership differs with its GM on such an essential matter, what’s the point of keeping him? And, even though Knight has finally constructed a roster of playoff caliber, in-house consensus seems to hold that he took too long to do it.
Woodson is a trickier case. His record (106-222) is a horror, but there’s appreciation for his work within the Spirit. He was given a wretched roster in 2004 and then was handed Marvin and Shelden Williams (as opposed to Chris Paul and Brandon Roy). Through all the losing, he managed not to lose his players. The proof came in the series just completed.
“Woody had his team ready to play,” said Celtics coach Doc Rivers, the erstwhile Hawk. “Even in Games 1 and 2, you could tell they believed they could win.”
The sentimentalist in me would say Woodson deserves to stay for riding out four difficult seasons and keeping his team on the upward trail. Contrary to popular belief, there’s nothing wrong with his X’s and O’s — nobody who played for Bobby Knight and who worked for Larry Brown can be accused of not knowing the game — and his half-court offense is essentially the same as everyone else’s: pick-and-rolls and pin-downs, curls and isolations.
“If the players want me, I’ll be the coach,” Woodson said Monday. “If the owners want me, I’ll be the coach.”
How far away, he was asked, are the Hawks from being a bona fide contender?
“Not far away,” he said. “We’re 13 games from 50 wins. Would 50 wins have gotten a [first-round] homecourt advantage?”
Yes. Forty-six wins would have. And that, as cold-hearted as it might sound, is why the belief here remains as it was 2 1/2 months ago: That Woodson’s Hawks, for all their skill, leave too many winnable games on the table. (Five more regular-season victories and they’d have played Orlando in Round 1.) He had them primed for the playoffs, but what about for January?
“A lot of games slipped away,” Smith said. “We should have been way better.”
There are men available — Avery Johnson, Jeff Van Gundy, perhaps Mike D’Antoni — who could take Woodson’s foundation and dress it up, who would arrive without the baggage of four consecutive losing seasons. The guess, though, is that Gearon and his partners will see it differently.
And if the Hawks perform under Woodson next season as they did in Games 3, 4 and 6, that will be seen as a shrewd decision. But what if, eight months hence, the Hawks are again treading water and we’re hearing the old lament, “We weren’t ready to play”? Will we regard one giddy series as a new beginning … or a false spring?
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